I have just downloaded a PDF magazine. It comes as double pages. That is, the first page is a single A4 portrait page, the second and third pages are two a4 pages combined into an A3 landscape page, and so on. Now I have tried to view it on a number of ebook readers on the iPad but non of them can handle two pages side by side. I want to read in portrait mode, and read one page at a time.

In portrait mode if I view a double page it squishes it up to take just half the screen. If I zoom in, the zoom resets back to small when I change to the next page.

There seem to be hundreds of ebook readers out there. Anyone found one that handles double a4 pages?

(I’ve tried iBooks, Kindle, Blio, Kobo and iPdf and none of them work!)

Good external microphones for the iPhone/iPad are expensive – not the kind of thing you want to buy and find out they are no good! Here’s a comparison of three external iPhone microphones: The Apogee MiC, Fostex AR-4i and Tascam iM2.

They were all tested on my iPhone 4s by recording into the FiRE iPhone recording app at full quality. On the microphones that had a volume adjustment, I adjusted it to be at the top of the green range in FiRE, quite conservative, no chance of clipping. I had the mic placed approx 20cm in front of my guitar sound-hole at the same height in all the tests. The Tascam doesn’t give any indication of levels, the Fostex has 4 LEDs on top to show the levels and the Apogee has a single LED on the front. The single LED on the Apogee seemed to give a better indication of input level than the three LED’s on the FOSTEX because the difference in brightness was easier to discern on the Apogee LED.

Mac the Ripper is a little program that allows you to copy a DVD to your computer, and at the same time it removes the copy protection. (This is called ‘ripping’ a DVD). This allows you for example to then copy it to a Macbook Air (that has no DVD drive) to watch, or you can take the extra step of converting it to a Quicktime movie so you can put it on an iPad or even into a Keynote presentation. Continue reading 〉

Someone asked me: “do you have any advice on how to copy a DVD onto another DVD.”

It’s quite easy, assuming it’s not a commercial DVD.

You use apple’s built in disk utility (in your utilities folder) to make a disk image of the dvd (select the DVD then select ‘new image’), it copies it exactly. The default options of compressed and none are fine.

You then use disk utility to burn the disk image you have just created back to a dvd. Select the image and choose ‘burn.’

It must be your own dvd, not a commercial one to to this.

This works with data DVD’s as well as movie DVD’s.

If you want to copy a Movie to your iPad or iPhone, that’s a different matter, see this article.